magisterrex Retro Games

I've been gaming since the days of Pong and still own a working Atari 2600. I tend to ramble on about retro games, whether they be board games, video games or PC games. Sometimes I digress. Decades after earning it, I'm finally putting the skills I learned while completing my history degree from the University of Victoria to good use. Or so I think. If you're into classic old school gaming, this blog is for you!

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Roberta Williams was responsible for many classic Sierra PC games, with the King’s Quest series being the most famous. In 1989 she created The Colonel’s Bequest, a mystery adventure game set in a plantation in the 1920’s. The copy protection used was an image of a fingerprint shown on the monitor that had to be matched up by using a special red-lensed magnifying glass while examining the game map for partially hidden fingerprints. Later versions simply included a “Fingerprint Sheet” that didn’t require this level of effort just to start the game. For those who have either lost the magnifying lens or the “Fingerprint Sheet”, and are desperate to solve this classic Laura Bow mystery, below is a reproduction. Enjoy!

I remember very well the buzz at the gaming table about a certain balding protagonist of a now-classic Sierra adventure game. He wasn’t your typical adventure game hero: he was a bumbler, a loser, an everyman shooting for the DD stars. All he wanted was a piece of the action. Well, a piece, at any rate. With the release of Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards Sierra On-Line in 1987, the 3D animated adventure game series entered a new, more (im)mature era, and a gaming icon was born. (A little tidbit: 3D in this case meant “Dancing, Drinking, and Dames.”)

Box art for Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards

Poor Larry was a luckless virgin with absolutely no game. He dressed in badly dated clothing and wore a gold chain, and by the start of the game, had come to the city of Lost Wages for one last shot at sleeping with a woman. The game began outside a bar with Larry vowing to become an ex-virgin. For many gamers, Leisure Suit Larry symbolized their own struggle to negotiate the turbulent waters of dealing with the opposite gender, and the game struck a nerve. If Larry could get lucky, any of us could, darn it!

Leisure Suit Larry creator, Al Lowe

The creative force tapped to make Leisure Suit Larry a reality was a programmer at Sierra who had previously guided some of the Disney licenses, such as The Black Cauldron, Donald Duck’s Playground, and Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood. Based on that body of work, who knew that Al Lowe would have such a twisted sense of humor? Al Lowe was an accomplished musician (complete with a degree in music), and had spent 15 years in the public school system teaching music. He enjoyed playing games, and decided to teach himself programming to make his own, and enter a new career. He completed a few games (Troll’s Tale and Dragon’s Keep were two of them) and sold them to the fledgling Sierra On-Line company, and stayed with them for 16 years.

Box art for Softporn Adventure by On-Line Systems

By his own admission, Al Lowe based much of Leisure Suit Larry on an old text adventure game written by Chuck Benton called Softporn Adventure. The game revolved around the player finding various inventory items to get into the pants of several women – sound familiar? Softporn Adventure was released for the Apple II system in 1981, selling 50,000 units for its publisher, On-Line Systems, (which eventually became Sierra On-Line). Considering Apple had sold around 350,000 Apple II systems by 1981, Softporn Adventure was a decent sized hit. Given that the Software Piracy Association’s estimated piracy rate was 40%, it was more likely that there were 70,000 copies floating around, which would be closer to 20% total market penetration. (Al Lowe claims the ratio to be 100,000 Apple II PCs and 25,000 Softporn games sold, but his statement may have been a little bit of poetic license.) Here’s a little historical tidbit for you: check out the lady on the right in the pic above…that’s Roberta Williams, in the buff.

Outside Lefty's bar in Leisure Suit Larry

With sales like this, it’s little wonder that Ken Williams (husband of Roberta and one of the founders of Sierra) approached Al Lowe to make a new game with a similar motif. They discussed updating Softporn Adventure to fit in the new 3-D animated adventure line-up, but as Lowe recalls telling Williams, “There’s no way I can do this as a serious game. It’s so out of it that it should be wearing a leisure suit…But if you let me mock it, I might be able to do a spoof of it.” And so, six months of programming later, Leisure Suit Larry entered the marketplace, with a very quiet launch to avoid incurring the wrath of Sierra’s major distributors (like the unamused charcoal-gray suits in the Tandy Corporation headquarters, who were responsible for up to 40% of Sierra’s software sales).

Hot tub babe in Leisure Suit Larry

Sales were very soft that first week, with only 4,000 copies sold; no advertising and no fanfare had its expected result. However, word-of-mouth was as powerful in 1987 as it is today, and sales jumped to an impressive 250,000 copies sold. The game even managed to garner the Software Publishers Association’s Best Fantasy, Role Playing or Adventure Game of 1987. It was eventually released on several platforms, including IBM PC (MS-DOS), Apple II, Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, Apple Macintosh, and the TRS-80.

Cover art for the VGA remake of Leisure Suit Larry

With the advent of VGA technology, Sierra brought Leisure Suit Larry to a new audience in 1991. It was relaunched with a completely redone game engine that used an icon-driven interface rather than a text-based parser, which was touted by the game packaging as an opportunity to “point-and-grope.” The re-release used an updated SCI (Sierra Creative Interpreter) engine, which permitted 256-color VGA graphics. This was quite the improvement upon the original 1987 game, whose highest graphics quality was 16 colors in a 300×200 screen.

Lefty's bar in the 1991 VGA remake of Leisure Suit Larry

Another avenue that Al Lowe was able to exercise his creative spirit within Larry’s universe was putting his music roots to good use by composing the theme music for the Land of the Lounge Lizards. The music was an integral component of Larry’s impending iconic status, using the primitive sound technology of the early PCs to create a jaunty tune that was easily identifiable as Larry’s theme. The VGA remake also had access to better audio technology, and so the music is much richer. There’s also much more of it, as Lowe could really only fit so much audio into a single 3.5″ or two 5.25″ floppy diskettes (what the original 1987 game came loaded on).

Musical score for Leisure Suit Larry

Al Lowe’s creation sold well enough that sequels were a highly anticipated inevitability. Lounge Lizards was followed by 1988’s Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking For Love (in Several Wrong Places), which was followed by 1989’s Leisure Suit Larry III: Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals. Typical of Lowe’s humorous approach to the series, the fourth game released in 1991 was actually entitled Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work. Lowe followed up that game in 1993 with Leisure Suit Larry 6: Shape Up Or Slip Out!. Lowe’s final Larry game was 1996’s Leisure Suit Larry: Love For Sail. The dawn of true 3-D adventures was upon the gaming industry, but Sierra did not have the cash reserves to retool their flagship titles to the new standard. Subsequently, Al Lowe was let go, ending his run as the narrator of the Leisure Suit Larry series, and ending Leisure Suit Larry‘s relevance. Yes, more games in the series would be released, but they would be empty shells, devoid of the charm that Al Lowe captured for so many years, victims of the rise of the bean-counters in the gaming industry. (Al Lowe is still on the Internet, and you can find him at his website: allowe.com How this creative man isn’t absolutely deluged with consultation requests from up-and-coming indie software developers amazes me.)

Hot tub babe from the 1991 version of Leisure Suit Larry I

If you have managed to avoid playing the original Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, it’s time for that to end. Yes, the graphics are hopelessly dated in comparison to the real-world graphic opuses that populate the gamerverse these days…but the joy of Leisure Suit Larry isn’t in the eye candy, it’s in the situational comedy coupled with Al Lowe’s scripting. Pick up a copy – this game is worth any retrogamer’s retrogaming time!

As most old-school gamers know, the company was founded by the power-gaming couple of Ken and Roberta Williams in 1980. Back then it was known On-Line Systems. The games Mystery House and Time Zone were first released under this label.

By 1982, the company changed its name to Sierra On-Line, but used two other labels to sell some of their product line. SierraVenture was created to sell the company’s re-released software that once sold under the On-Line Systems brand, while the company’s action/arcade games were to be produced under the SierraVision label. Both logos were discontinued in 1984, and the company published all their titles under the Sierra On-Line label.

As revenues increased, so did buying opportunities for Sierra, which had become a software juggernaut. The company acquired other software companies, often including both logos on subsequent products. Purchases included…

A new King’s Quest chapter is now available free online from Phoenix Online Game Development. No, it’s not Sierra Online, but it does have an interesting endorsement from Roberta Williams, the creator of King’s Quest. This goes beyond creating a mod, and is more the coding version of fan fiction, with varied production values, but certainly worth a look, if only for the novelty. You can download it HERE

Any blog about classic retro gaming simply MUST include a homage to Roberta Williams’ King’s Quest series, originally published by Ken and Roberta Williams’ Sierra On-Line company in the 1980s.

King's Quest IBM PC Jr Version Front Cover

The story was a simple one: the Kingdom of Daventry is in trouble as three of its greatest treasures – a mirror that tells the future, a shield that protects its user from danger, and a chest that is always filled with gold – have been stolen. The King sends Sir Graham, an honest and unpretentious young knight, on a quest to recover the treasures. Should he succeed, he will become King. Should he fail, he’ll become worm food. Of course, how Graham accomplishes the task before him is up to the player!

King's Quest Tandy 1000 Release

This was the original “big-game” release. The industry was still very new, and it was not unusual for games to be coded by a single person over a couple of weeks for a low budget. King’s Quest was coded by six people with Roberta Williams as the project leader, with a cost of $700,000, for an 18-month period. This was completely unheard of, and was a very risky gamble that ultimately paid off, fueling an entire line of games from Sierra On-Line.

King's Quest Screenshot

King’s Quest was a huge leap forward for gaming. In a time when games either were completely text-based or with the occasional static graphic, King’s Quest provided character interaction with the game environment. By pressing the arrow keys, Sir Graham could walk across the screen and could cross in front of or behind objects, making the game the first 3-D adventure. And even though the interface was still text-based (you typed in what action you wanted to do), seeing the result of what you typed made for classic gaming.

King's Quest classic "gold box" edition

Like any good adventure game, the puzzles in King’s Quest were varied and fun. The Sierra team programmed puzzles to have more than one solution, and points were awarded to the player depending on what actions they took. And unlike many of the action, destroy-everything-you-see games of the time, King’s Quest rewarded players with a higher score if they found non-violent solutions.

King's Quest EGA 1990 Release

There have been several releases of King’s Quest over the years, starting with the original version in 1983, which was packaged up in the IBM PC Jr series of computers. Fortunately, poor sales of the computer did not result in the termination of the King’s Quest franchise, as it was released in Apple II, PC (boot disk) and Tandy format in 1984 to general fanfare, and around 500,000 copies sold. The game sold well enough that it was re-released in 1987 in the Amiga, Atari ST, Macintosh and MS-DOS formats, which sent it back up the sales charts. (It was at that time that the second part of the title, “Quest For The Crown,” was added.) It even crossed over into the console video game charts with a version for the Sega Master System in 1989.

King's Quest EGA Screenshot

King’s Quest was remade in 1990 with much better graphics and music card support. The quest points were changed slightly, which meant that the game itself played somewhat differently from the original. A fan-made King’s Quest was released in 2001 by AGD Interactive, which has seen many updates right up to 2009. You can find it here: http://www.agdinteractive.com/games/kq1/

King's Quest 2001 Fan Re-Release

King’s Quest was such a solid game that it spawned an entire genre, the 3-D animated adventure. Sierra shot to the top of the gaming industry with hit after hit, including an entire King’s Quest series, Space Quest, Quest for Glory, Police Quest, and so forth. If you haven’t played any of the original games, give them a try. Yes, they’re incredibly simple and crude versus the immersive gaming environments we play in today, but they’re an important part of gaming history. Be a retro gamer and Quest for the Crown today!